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by oofbey 1479 days ago
Balmer or not, Microsoft is still in direct competition with Apple for much of its core business. So encouraging customers to buy a laptop where they get $50 for the windows license and if they're lucky another $100 in software sales, but their key competitor gets >=$1000 of profit -- yeah, it's pretty clearly a bad business choice.
1 comments
sgjohnson 1478 days ago
Not really. OEMs pay significantly less for Windows licenses than they are retailed for.

And Windows sales to consumers haven't been a core part of their business for a while now. It's all about cloud and enterprise.

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oofbey 1478 days ago
Just looked at the earnings report and I have to agree with you. Windows + Office was 25% of MS's revenue in 2021, but I suspect you're right that the big majority of that is not consumer-driven. FWIW just 2 years back, Windows + Office was 40% of revenue, so this segment is very rapidly becoming less important.
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